The Nefarious Company's Many Tentacles

Mrs. Uneven and I were discussing the merits of the various Prison Break seasons the other day when I was brought up short by her comment that she had really enjoyed the show up until they were going after "The Company." She went on to complain that The Company had been showing up on more and more shows and that she found the whole thing boring. How many people do they have working for them that they're on a bunch of different shows.

She was jesting, but the concept of the "The Company" being behind several nefarious plots/operations has been an omnipresent and mutating meme in the collective unconscious for decades. Until that conversation it had never occurred to me that The Company in Burn Notice could be the same as the one in Prison Break. Does Carla work for the General too, and is he only one part of MANAGEMENT? What other shows and characters does the Company manipulate and harass? Are they the shadowy group leading and misleading Fox Mulder too? How deep is their reach?

Is this the way the Illuminati reveal themselves in the Information Age? They take control of all mass media and then produce entertainment which blatantly depicts hidden power manipulating events to its own ends? Isn't that what the conspiracy memes tell us? What better way than for the hidden group to call itself by one name repeated over and over in many different fictional tales. The fact they keep referring to themselves as "The Companay" simply produces the same ironic enjoyment of James Garner's dog named Dog and horse named Horse. BTW The Company as shadow government meme originally started out at the CIA before moving to FEMA. Presumably this movement of the meme's signifier was due to exposure of the CIA's utter incompetence during Congressional hearings in the 1970s. This of course begs the question of where The Company moves to now.

Traveler: A Retread of the Da Vinci Code & National Treasure?

Traveler has been one of the real joys of the summer season for a conspiracy fan like me. Like the X-Files, the show revolves around a conspiracy composed of high-level government officials involved in a shadowy project. They claim to be derived from the "Fourth Branch," of which the only clue we have regarding them is a painting which seemingly depicts the Continental Congress at work.

And of course the primary conspirator of which we are aware is a high level official at the Department of Homeland Security, since DHS has replaced FEMA in conspiracy/public consciouness. Under the aegis of the Fourth Branch, the conspirators start to implement a plan of domestic terrorism in order to gain more power at the expense of public freedom.

Where I'm going with this is that the painting implies that the Fourth Branch was created at the beginning of the Republic and is a secret branch of the government dedicated to protecting it from internal enemies (remember the Alien & Sedition Acts?). This bears some similarity to the conspriracies in both National Treasure and the Da Vinci Code.

I would argue that the conspiracy in Traveler is more engaging and franklyT simply more interesting than that of the above mentioned movies. Most of the episodes share Prison Break's break-neck pace and cliff-hanger endings combined, with great effect, with an equally intriguing story line. The most interesting contrast between the two shows is that with Prison Break, the audience witnesses the inside of the conspiracy, while in Traveler we witness the quest for knowlege of the consipiracy.

To answer my own question: No. It is not.